Unto Death by Amos Oz

Unto Death comprises two novellas by one of Israel's most gifted writers. In "Crusade" and "Late Love" Oz explores the atmosphere of hatred in which Jews live, die, or degenerate into insanity, in Medieval times and today. In "Crusade" a band of Crusaders headed by a French knight journeys towards Jerusalem, attacking and killing Jews along the way. Their initial spirit of triumph and passion for salvation gives way before depression as disease and deprivation slow their progress. In "Late Love," set in modern-day Israel, an aged lecturer who willingly ignores his deteriorating body cannot ignore his paranoid visions of the destruction of his people by Soviet Russia.

Considered by many to be some of Oz's most powerful writing, Unto Death has appeared in America, England, France, Finland, Sweden, Spain, Holland, Russia, the Ukraine, and Poland.

Amos Oz was born in 1939 in Jerusalem, and at the age of 15 went to live on Kibbutz Hulda. He studied philosophy and literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University, author-in- residence at the Hebrew University and writer-in-residence at Colorado College. He has been named Officer of Arts and Letters of France. An author of prose for both children and adults, as well as an essayist, he has been widely translated and is internationally acclaimed. Many of his stories are set either on a kibbutz or in Jerusalem, both of which he presents as microcosms of Israeli society. He has been honoured with the French Prix Femina and the 1992 Frankfurt Peace Prize. He lives in the southern town of Arad and teaches literature at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

"Oz's power as a writer is remarkable. One has the sense of a generous imagination at work."
- New York Times Book Review

"Eloquent, humane, even religious in the deepest sense, [Oz] emerges as a kind of Zionist Orwell: a complex man obsessed with simple decency and determined above all to tell the truth, regardless of whom it offends."
- Newsweek